Whistlejacket: The Horse Portrait That Broke the Rules

Stubbs, born in Liverpool on 24 August 1724, the son of a tanner, was largely self-taught.² In the 1750s he spent 18 months in a remote Lincolnshire village dissecting horses, in a barn fitted to hang the carcasses from the ceiling, drawing every stage.^{1, 2}

The result, The Anatomy of the Horse, published in 1766, became a major reference for naturalists and artists alike.² No British painter of his day understood a horse's body better.¹

Compare Whistlejacket with a more usual Stubbs, like the Met's hunter above: a groom, a dog, a landscape. In Whistlejacket, Stubbs leaves out any rider, riding equipment or location, and paints the horse against a neutral background of pale gold.¹

The rearing pose, called a levade, had been used by Rubens and Velázquez for heroic portraits of kings on horseback. There, the horse is always under the rider's control. Here, there is nobody to control it.¹

Stubbs also took liberties with anatomy for drama: you can see the rump and the forehead at the same time, and both the right knee and the underside of a hoof.¹

A story claims that a rider, perhaps George III, was planned and then dropped. The National Gallery finds no evidence: Whistlejacket's back is too short for a saddle, and the canvas shows no drawing of a rider. Viewers were simply unused to the idea of a horse portrayed on its own.¹

That freedom is why the gallery sees in it a spirit that prefigures Romanticism's celebration of nature,¹ the mood we met in Friedrich's Wanderer. For horses painted in a very different spirit, see Franz Marc's blue horses.